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Closing Job Corps is not just bad policy — it’s a profound abandonment • Minnesota Reformer [1]

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Date: 2025-07-23

We’ll call her Anaya, but she could be any of our daughters, nieces, classmates, or friends — someone who’s struggled to hold a job, manage chronic pain or overcome instability and trauma.

Anaya was finishing her Job Corps training to become a nursing assistant. As a physician at her center, I’d gotten to know her through a chronic pain management program we run for students like her. Then, without warning, the Trump administration shut down the entire Job Corps program. Anaya, her certification unfinished, packed up and drove 1,000 miles home, her future uncertain.

A court injunction briefly revived the program. When we called Anaya back, she walked into our third session beaming. Her peers erupted in cheers. “Finish strong,” they told her. And she is.

As a physician and public health researcher at the University of Minnesota, I provide care at the Hubert H. Humphrey Job Corps Center in St. Paul, where I witnessed the organizational chaos and emotional toll of the shutdown. At more than 120 centers across the country, nearly 20,000 young adults were given five days to find food, housing, health care and a new path forward. The shutdown has been paused — for now — but the president’s proposed budget eliminates funding. The stakes are high, and the outlook is dire.

Closing Job Corps is not just bad policy — it’s a profound abandonment of a proven investment in public health, community stability and economic opportunity. For more than six decades, the program has given young adults in the most challenging situations a real chance at success in essential, in-demand fields like construction, health care, business and transportation.

Its integrated model works where trade-only training falls short. Many students aren’t ready to succeed in a job-training program alone — they’re dealing with untreated health conditions, trauma, unstable housing, or gaps in basic needs that make learning impossible. Job Corps addresses these barriers directly.

Students receive help enrolling in health insurance and have on-campus access to medical, dental and mental health care. This support stabilizes health, builds confidence and enables learning — helping young people avoid long-term disability, emergency room use and reliance on public assistance. It’s a cost-effective strategy for building a healthier, more resilient workforce.

Job Corps has long enjoyed bipartisan support. It offers a practical solution to complex challenges, providing a hand up — not a handout — to young people facing intersecting barriers. Rigorous research shows its benefits are real and measurable: increased income and educational attainment, reduced criminal justice involvement and lives like Anaya’s, back on track.

The justification for closure rests on a hasty April 2025 internal report claiming the program “no longer achieves the outcomes students deserve.” That report ignores independent evaluations and overstates issues like student violence and drug use, while narrowly focusing on cost and omitting the lived realities of those it serves.

My first response was: Compared to what? We confront violence and substance use every day. That’s the point. Job Corps meets students where they are and offers them something better. No program is perfect — but this one works. And the alternative is the failure of no action at all.

Dismantling the Job Corps behind closed doors leaves nearly 20,000 young people — and the next cohort to come — without a safe, supportive path to a productive life. That’s not reform. That’s abandonment.

Let’s not give it up quietly.

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[1] Url: https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/07/23/closing-job-corps-is-not-just-bad-policy-its-a-profound-abandonment/

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